Real Estate Trends – Boston’s Hyde Park #2

Introduction:

Welcome back again for our latest real estate market trend report. For those of you that are here for the first time what we do in these reports is examine the real estate market in a city or town in Massachusetts or New Hampshire to evaluate the current conditions. We do this by looking at the changes in three key metrics year over year for the municipality to see how the market has changed and then evaluate what those observations might mean for that market moving forward.

Market Trends in Boston’s Hyde Park – May 2015 and 2016:

The Hyde Park section of Boston, MA market has fallen off a bit since last year. The average prices are down and the median prices were down quite a bit more. The days on market were up as well. Inventory was fairly stable with 8 sales in May of 2015 down to 7 in May 2016.

Average Listing Prices:

We will first start off by looking at the average listing price. In Boston, MA’s Hyde Park section the average listing price in May 2015 was $358,088. This was down to $359,257 in May 2016. This is flat with a meaningless increase of 0.003% year over year. As mentioned before we looked at Hyde Park last year at this time, so let’s take a look at the 3 year view of the market. Way back in May of 2014 the average listing price was $410,660 which gives a 12.52% decrease since then.

Looking at the median prices we see that they were higher in 2016 and about the same in 2015. For May of 2015 the median listing price for the Hyde Park neighborhood of Boston, MA was $404,450 and in May 2016 it was $359,000 which now gives large decrease of 11.24%. Same as above let’s look at the May 2014 median price, which was $357,500 giving a meaningless 0.004% increase. As you can see the median price actually was up in 2015 but fell back to the 2014 level again this year.

Average Sale Prices:

The next thing we will be looking at is the average sale prices. The average sale price in Boston, MA’s Hyde Park section in May of 2015 was $370,188 and in May 2016 that was down to $348,646. That gives a modest decrease of 5.82%, but a meaningful drop after seeing a flat average list price. Again going back two years we see the average sale price in 2014 was $395,600 giving a two year decline of 11.87%.

We see a slightly different pattern that we did for the median list price. We once again see it was higher in 2016 but this time it was a bit lower in 2015. For May of 2015 the median sales price for Boston, MA’s Hyde Park was $411,750 and in May 2016 it was $329,000 giving a very large decrease of 20.10%. Similar to the median list price it was up a little in 2015 from 2014 but then back down, however this time it did not just flatten out again as the median price in May 2014 was $355,000 giving a two year change of decrease of 7.32%.

Prices are down definitely down for Boston, MA’s Hyde Park neighborhood in May. The changes in the averages and medians and for the one year and two year changes were a bit all over the place. Looking at just the one year change (as we concentrate on in all of these reports up to now) it is clear prices are down a lot. The metrics were still a little inconsistent with the average list price being flat and then only a modest decrease with the average sale price, but then a pretty big decrease in the median list price and a very big 20% drop in the median sale price. Medians are the preferred analysis method and sales matter more than listing prices the most weight is given to that 20% drop, however I do think it is fair to think that might be too high given the big swing in all the other numbers being smaller than this. Best guess is that maybe the truth is more in the middle at something like 15% if you blend the data. On a 2 year basis things aren’t really any clearer. In this case with a bump in the median prices in 2015 those numbers are lower than the one year numbers, but with the average price dropping each year that is saying double digit drops. Again the median sale price should get the most weight and that is about 7.5% down. In this case I think that is the best guess using those larger average price drops and the flat median list price to cancel out any major adjustment to that number.

Average Days on Market:

Finally the last metric we look at are the average days on market, which is the measure of how long it takes for a property to sell in the current market. For the Hyde Park area of Boston, MA the average days on market in May of 2015 were 26.63 and the average days on market for May 2016 were 42.29 for a sizable 58.81% increase. We can again look at the two year numbers and if we do that we see the days on market in May 2014 were 45.80 now giving a decrease of 7.66%. Similar to some of the above pricing data we see a dip in 2015 and then back up in 2016 to the previous level.

Hyde Park, Massachusetts Summary:

The Hyde Park area of Boston, Massachusetts real estate market is down a bit since last year. The average sale price was down while the median prices were down even more. The days on market were also up.

In summary if you are looking to sell a house in Boston, MA’s Hyde Park neighborhood now you should expect to get less for it than you would have gotten last year. You should also expect it to take a bit more time to sell compared to last year as well.